Bobshirt interviews have kinda replaced Epicly Later’d as the eminent series for telling stories about the good old days. Every edition is great, but the new one with Giovanni Reda is a truly special. He’s an encyclopedia of New York skateboarding. Also #respect on the comments re: having no shame in fanning out in adult years :)

It’s incredible how the crowd consensus on a new skatepark in New York can go from “It’s so fun, flows well, actually has straight [fucking] ledges” to “it’s too dusty, everything is uphill and awkward” in 72 hours. Are we the worst? Probably. NY Skateboarding has photos of the completed Fat Kid Skatepark in downtown Brooklyn.

Did we singlehandedly ruin Copenhagen? No, probably not. Did we contribute to turning it into Tulum for boys, to the point where everyone goes there for “vacation” and sees the same people from the side of the ocean that they just left? Not no.

It was an obsession that began with the Ragers Inc. clip, filmed during the world’s greatest skateboarder’s tenure in the world’s greatest place, circa 2011. Since then, it has become the epicenter of the world’s most absurd spots, and “home to skateboarding’s SXSW.” A few dozen Copenhagen trips between the two, and Danish-set skateboarding content on QS has hit critical mass. Maybe we’ll check out Bucharest?

It brings us great shame — both as devout front row #fashionweek attendants but also unpaid Copenhagen tourist board employees — to discover that apparently there’s a Copenhagen fashion week? Who would’ve thought designers need an entire [half] week dedicated to wearing all black, avoiding eye contact and appearing indifferent? Maybe that’s every fashion week though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Word is that they timed #CPHFW along with the CPH Open contest, which is like the perfect storm for potential bad decisions (turning a watermelon into a pipe, etc.) Anyway, back to Sremmlife 2…

Some extras embedded below, including a day-trip excursion to Malmö, the proverbial Newark to Copenhagen’s New York. (It’s a lot nicer than Newark.)

It is tough to come up with an unjustified hyperbole about Copenhagen. I watched a board shoot out into an old lady’s bike the other day, and she smiled it off, waved goodbye and went about her business. We were skating a playground in a place that by some Scandinavian stretch, had Bushwick playground vibes, and accidentally almost crashed into a five-year-old. The response was “try and watch out for the kids” — not “fam I’m deadass about to get all my cousins to pull up and shoot you.” The place is a perfect concoction of people not giving a shit about what you’re doing, and people caring so much about what you do because they’ll line every modern public space with some sort of perfectly skateable object.

The T.F. here doesn’t have its boxes taken away in 48 hour cycles. In the summer, you spend zero time inside a car or train. Places will serve you sexy cocktails to go. You can enjoy a beer or six, and some guy will not be far off waiting to collect your empty can moments after you finish. Every spot is parallel to some of the earth’s luckiest bike seats ♥. Even drunk street meat decisions don’t seem to be as much of a gastrointestinal threat as they do stateside. Sure, it’s expensive and cold in the winter, but we live in New York. Don’t sit here and tell me about expensive and cold when your boy just found the deal of a lifetime for a $1300 10 x 10 off the Myrtle-Broadway stop that he needs to still buy a spaceheater for, but still sleeps in his socks.

Just in time for the coldest weekend of the winter, here’s the full video from last month’s Puerto Rico trip with Ishod and the Most Productive Crew™ in New York City skateboarding. Many of us are in our third year of embracing Puerto Rico as the east coast’s winter retreat, so we stepped a bit outside of our San Juanese comfort zone to cruise around New York’s sixth borough.